Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 3, 1997

WITH HER IN OURLAND

The early 20th century writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman ("Herland," "The Yellow Wallpaper," "Women and Economics") tried to imagine an ideal world -- and found that it was a universe without men.

Populated by athletic, civic- minded women, bound together in "exquisite and unbroken friendship," this cultural panacea named "Herland" abolished -- along with testosterone -- capitalism, warfare, avarice, envy, and Western notions of individualism.

In the wonderful novel "Herland" (published in 1915), a trio of men -- an adventurer, a doctor and a sociologist -- ventures deep into the jungle to find Herland. Each falls in love there, and each suffers because the women of Herland have no sexual interest in men -- they reproduce by parthenogenesis and base their social lives on friendship. One man becomes a parody of the emasculated "wimp," another a violent boor, eaten up by frustration. Only the sociologist narrator responds with a modicum of reasonable complexity, deciding to explore this novel kind of intimacy with his Herland wife, Ellador.

In the just reissued, less successful sequel, "With Her in Ourland," Gilman transports Ellador and her husband (along with the hostile adventurer, expelled for trying to rape his Herland spouse) back to "Ourland." Here the characters visit the social injustice, economic inequities and political turmoil of the real world. The novel becomes a travelogue as Ellador, a model of Progressive-era idealism, meticulously records what she sees on her around-the- globe tour.

In China she confronts, with considerable horror and consternation, the "shrunken stumps" of women whose feet have been bound. Eventually ending up in the United States, Ellador finds no respite from the "crowded cities . . . wasted soil . . . private wealth that is monstrous and general poverty that is -- disgraceful." Gilman also uses Ellador to mock our cultural presumptions. "When you say 'the civilized world,' " Ellador muses, "that is just a figure of speech. The world is not civilized yet."

Without the narrative tension of "Herland" -- what will happen to the men in this women's fantasy land? -- "With Her in Ourland" disappoints as a novel. One tires of Ellador's above-the-fray incredulity, and Gilman's political agenda becomes weighty and pedantic as she delivers a litany of society's failures.

As a social document, however, "With Her in Ourland" remains fascinating. Through the characters' eyes, the reader takes in the hypocrisy and deprivation wrought by capitalismand the "ghastly depths of misery and . . . submission to the inevitable" experienced by most women of that era.

"With Her in Ourland" also showcases the idiosyncratic mix of Fabian socialism, Darwinism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism underlying Gilman's world view. Excoriating Judaism, which "well-nigh killed Christianity," as a "most evil religion," Gilman, in the voice of Ellador, also takes issue with open immigration because "only some of the races -- or some individuals in a given race -- have reached the democratic stage."

An introduction to the volume by sociologist Mary Jo Deegan, by turns ponderous and instructive, attempts to situate Gilman's "elitism and ethnocentrism" in the larger context of her involvement in Progressive reforms and the thinking of other social theorists of that period.